1/3 of applicants have accepted a second-choice job offer because of delayed interview feedback, finds study.

Right up there with going to the dentist and sitting an exam has to be the great tradition of going for a job interview. Particularly now it’s November, and recent graduates will be gearing up for this. You sit there, being asked probing questions by someone you’ve never met, trying hard to impress them and make them think you’re the perfect person for the job, while hoping they haven’t noticed how sweaty your armpits are.

Considering how much we psyche ourselves up for an interview, it would be great to firstly be told if we didn’t get the job, which many employers fail to do, and some feedback on how we did. After all, it would help us give a better interview next time. But it seems that feedback from a company after they’ve interviewed a candidate isn’t necessarily a priority, or even a given.

Indeed, a recent study by Virgin Media showed that unhappy, rejected candidates would actually go as far as to cancel their service with the company. They found that 18% of their rejected candidates were Virgin Media customers. Not only would they cancel their own service, they would go on to communicate their bad experience to others. The result was a potential loss of millions of pounds of revenue*.

Video interview company Shortlister conducted a survey of 2,600 job applicants to discover what experiences job seekers have had following an unsuccessful interview, particularly that of receiving feedback as to why they didn’t get the job.

Firstly, they discovered that Scottish companies take the longest to give feedback to unsuccessful candidates – there, it takes on average 36 days (well over a month) to hear anything back at all. This was followed by the South West of England, where employers take on average 29 days. However, if you’re an employer in the South East, you’re the speediest; they take only 17 days to get back to applicants.

The job seekers were also surveyed by industry, to find out which one is worst at providing feedback. The worst performing was the retail industry, where over half of candidates reported not getting any feedback following an unsuccessful application. The most considerate industry is the legal sector, where only 10% of applicants never received any feedback.